Corvo Island residents switch off lights to protect young seabirds
The five-night blackout initiative in the Azores archipelago aims to help Cory's shearwater fledglings find the ocean.
Residents of Corvo, the smallest and northernmost island in Portugal’s Azores archipelago, switch off public lights for five nights every autumn to assist young seabirds. According to the Times of India, the latest initiative took place between October 26 and 30, with lights turned off between 9pm and 4am.
The effort targets Cory's shearwaters, which spend about three months in nests before flying toward the Atlantic Ocean. While these birds follow the night sky, artificial light from buildings and streets can disorient them, leading them toward populated areas where they face predators, vehicles, and dehydration.
The Portuguese Society for the Study of Birds (SPEA) stated that public lighting is switched off during these vulnerable autumn periods. Monitoring through the EELabs project found that approximately 85 per cent of incidents involving grounded young shearwaters occurred when streetlights were on.
Since 1995, the Azorean government has run the SOS Cagarro campaign across all nine islands. The wider campaign has rescued more than 30,000 Cory's shearwater fledglings since 2015, with approximately 6,000 of those rescued on Corvo.
In Vila do Corvo, volunteers patrol the settlement to find disoriented birds. Those found are kept in cardboard boxes overnight to recover and are released from coastal cliffs the following morning.